Bredolab botnet mastermind gets four years in Armenian jail

Avansov, a Russian citizen who was arrest in 2010 in Armenia, was convicted on Monday of creating and running the Bredolab botnet of 30 million computers, reported Radio Free Europe.

At its height, Bredolab was sending out some 3.6 billion infected e-mail messages per day and was spreading at a rate of some three million computers a month.

As reported by Infosecurity, Bredolab's main purpose was to download other malicious programs onto victim computers. One of the botnet's most distinguishing features was its method of operation: legitimate websites that had been hacked were used to spread the botnet's payload.

Visitors to these websites were redirected to malicious resources, which resulted in their computers being infected with Backdoor.Win32.Bredolab.

One of the key features of the Bredolab botnet was the closely repeating cycle the botnet used to build up its zombie networks, in which infected computers subsequently infected websites, which in turn infected new victim computers.